"You will not find animals in misery, in anguish.

"All these institutions which exist upon your misery are bound to create more and more misery; that is their feeding ground, that is their food. A miserable man is bound, sooner or later, to end up in a religion because he will need consolations. He does not have reality to support him; he will need fictions to substitute for reality.

"He knows nothing about love. He has been prevented from the very beginning from knowing what love is. He has been diverted into something else which is not love, which is only a game – artificial, a hypocrisy. You can pretend, but it is not going to nourish you. It is, on the contrary, going to exhaust you. It is going to take so much out of you because it is not a simple phenomenon.

"To pretend continuously is a heavy job, perhaps the heaviest in the world. You can carry a mountain on your head – that will not be so heavy as carrying for your whole life, all kinds of lies, pretensions, false faces.

"You become a mess just trying to keep all those faces, pretensions, lies, together. They are all falling apart; all are against each other, and they have no roots in reality. You have to feed them your own blood, your own heart, your own marrow. Naturally it creates a miserable world.

"But the priests are happy with the miserable world. They were very unhappy with pagans, so unhappy with pagans that the very word pagan became condemnatory.

"One day I was talking to Vivek, just taking my tea. I said, 'I am a pagan.'

"She said, 'Never use that word in the West.'

"I said, 'Why? It is such a beautiful word.'

"She said, 'It may be beautiful for you, but Christianity, Judaism, the whole West, uses the word in a very derogatory sense.'

"I said, 'I was not aware of it. That means now I have to use it for myself. The word has to be freed from these criminals and their hands. They have destroyed a beautiful word.'

"Once the pagan existed on the earth and he was as happy as any other animal; he knew nothing of misery."